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The latest Heatmap poll finds that on permitting, at least, most people are just fine with compromise.
Most Americans support the idea of a bipartisan law that would make it easier to build new clean energy projects while benefiting some oil and gas development, according to a Heatmap News poll conducted earlier this month.
Some 52% of Americans said they backed the general idea of the legislation, the poll found. About a quarter of Americans opposed it, and roughly another quarter said they weren’t sure.
That’s good news for one of the last remaining pieces of environmental policy that Congress could pass under this presidency: a bipartisan proposal from Senators Joe Manchin and John Barrasso that would speed up the process of building climate-friendly infrastructure in exchange for concessions to the oil and gas industry.
The legislation is meant to bind together Democratic and Republican goals for the country’s energy development. Democrats in Congress and the White House are worried that permitting delays and excessive red tape could now slow down America’s shift away from fossil fuels. This year, for instance, the United States will add less new wind capacity than it has in any year since 2020. Experts say that’s due in large part to the lack of new power lines to parts of the country where wind is abundant. Even many progressives, who have historically championed stricter permitting and environmental review laws, now favor altering them in the abstract to speed the zero-carbon buildout — although prominent groups have opposed this particular deal.
Republicans, meanwhile, have accused the Biden administration of dragging its feet on making federally owned lands available for oil and gas development. The Biden administration leased 95% fewer acres in 2023 than the Trump administration did in 2019, according to E&E News.
Under President Biden, the Interior Department has acknowledged that oil and gas drilling on public lands worsens climate change, but said that information alone does not allow it to block new leases. From 2005 to 2019, roughly one quarter of all fossil fuel extraction in the United States happened on federal land.
Beyond those facts, however, having a national conversation about permitting reform is tricky because so many proposals are so deep in the weeds that their importance often isn’t immediately obvious. How many voters are ready to debate whether the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission should be able to fast-track certain new power lines? Or why there should be a statute of limitations for some National Environmental Policy Act lawsuits? (If you’re curious, I wrote a cheat sheet on some of the biggest permitting reform proposals last year.)
Indeed, many of the people Heatmap polled told us they didn’t know enough to decide whether they were for or against the bill — but those who did feel confident answering largely said they were in favor of it. Across cities and suburbs, political parties and age groups, permitting reform is about 15 to 25 points above water. Republicans are somewhat more amenable to the compromise than Democrats: 58% of GOP voters support the proposal, while only 47% of Democrats do. Independents are most skeptical at 44%, though the idea of the deal still has more independent supporters than opponents.
The idea of a deal commands majority support in every region of the country. It’s also supported by most Americans who say they live in rural areas, small towns, suburbs, and small cities. (Among Americans who live in large cities, the measure commands 48% support.) Even Americans who say they would oppose some forms of energy development in their area — such as a hydrogen project or battery storage plant — back the proposal.
This all suggests that the permitting reform deal could remain largely depoliticized as Congress continues to debate it through the fall — if you were to summarize respondents’ reactions to the survey, it might look like, “Sure, whatever, sounds good.” The public’s apparent openness to a deal also comes as its concern for urgent action on climate change has somewhat cooled since 2020.
Over the past few years, too, polls have detected a substantive drop in Republican support for clean energy development. While 54% of conservative Republicans backed clean energy in 2018 according to a Yale poll, that figure has since fallen to 24%. Building more clean energy does not even command a majority of liberal and moderate Republican support anymore, Anthony Leiserowitz, a Yale professor of climate change communication, told me.
A separate poll — from the Pew Research Center — found that Republican support for building more wind and solar farms has fallen by 20 percentage points since President Joe Biden took office, although it also showed that both energy sources commanded majority support.
“Clean energy used to be one of those things that pretty much everyone supported more or less,” Leiserowitz said. “That is important. That is the backdrop to the deeper currents behind the increasing opposition to wind farms and solar farms across the country.”
“Clean energy,” he added, “has become much more politicized than it was in the past.”
The Heatmap poll of 5,202 American adults was conducted by Embold Research via online responses from August 3 to 16, 2024. The survey included interviews with Americans in all 50 states and Washington, D.C. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 1.4 percentage points.
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Rob and Jesse riff on the state of utility regulation in America — and how to fix it.
Electricity is getting more expensive — and the culprit, in much of the country, is the poles and wires. Since the pandemic, utility spending on the “last mile” part of the power grid has surged, and it seems likely to get worse before it gets better.
How can we fix it? Well, we can start by fixing utility regulation.
On today’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk about why utility regulation sucks and how to make it better. In Europe and other parts of the world, utilities are better at controlling their cost overruns. What can the U.S. learn from their experience? Why is it so hard to regulate electricity companies? And how should the coming strains of electrification, and climate change affect how we think about the power grid? Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: This is, I think, exactly where the wonky habit of referring to this as “T&D,” or transmission and distribution —
Jesse Jenkins: Yeah, we should split those.
Meyer: — simply because it’s a part of people’s bills, is actually driving the misnomer, because it allows renewable opponents — like the current administration, like officials in the current administration to say, Oh, well, the transmission and distribution section, the wire is part of the grid, is the surging part of electricity costs, this is driven by renewables. And that kind of does cohere to a mental model people might have of, oh, you have to build a lot of solar farms everywhere, or, oh, you have to build a lot of wind farms everywhere. They’re distributed over the landscape, unlike a single big power plant or something, and therefore that is driving up transmission spending.
And indeed, for renewables, as Jesse was saying, you do have to build more transmission. But where you look at the actual increase in prices is coming from in that T&D section of the bill, it is not at all that story. It’s all coming from distribution.
Jenkins: It’s certainly not coming from long-distance transmission because we’re not building any long-distance transmission, right?
And that’s the other big problem, is we have not been building transmission at anywhere near the pace that we have historically during periods when demand was growing rapidly to tap into the best resources around the country. But also, then, we should be, if we were to try to tap into American renewable energy resources that could lower consumer costs. The transmission we are building is mostly also local, short-distance, reliability-related upgrades that the transmission utilities are able to build with much less regulatory oversight.
Mentioned:
Rob on how electricity got so expensive
Matthew Zeitlin on Trump’s electricity price problem
Ofgem’s price cap
Previously on Shift Key: How to Talk to Your Friendly Neighborhood Public Utility Regulator
Jesse’s upshift (plus one more); Rob’s upshift.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
Hydrostor is building the future of energy with Advanced Compressed Air Energy Storage. Delivering clean, reliable power with 500-megawatt facilities sited on 100 acres, Hydrostor’s energy storage projects are transforming the grid and creating thousands of American jobs. Learn more at hydrostor.ca.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
A new report from Rhodium Group takes stock of how Trump’s policies will affect America’s emissions future.
In less than a year, the Trump administration has fully transformed U.S. climate and energy policy. The changes have come through the tax code, regulatory repeals, and sweeping but fickle tariffs. Taken together, it means that the worst-case scenario for climate action under Biden has now become the best-case scenario under Trump.
That’s one of the key findings of the Rhodium Group’s latest Taking Stock report, an annual look at how U.S. policies will shape our energy system and emissions trajectory. It’s the first comprehensive assessment of the degree to which Trump’s second term, early as it is, could impede the energy transition. While total U.S. emissions are not expected to go up in the coming decade, the report projects greatly diminished progress compared to the path we were on a year ago.
That point is most clearly illustrated by the following finding: For the past two decades, the U.S. has been reducing emissions by an average of 1% per year. In the coming decade, Rhodium projects that Trump’s policies could reduce this rate by more than half.
Last year’s report, produced at the absolute peak of U.S. climate policy, modeled the effect of clean energy tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act, new regulations on cars, trucks, power plants, and oil and gas operations, Biden’s freeze on new liquified natural gas export facilities, and a number of state-level policies. While these actions were not expected to be enough to fulfill Biden’s promise to the rest of the world under the Paris Agreement to cut emissions by 50% to 52% by 2030 compared to 2005, they represented America’s first credible show of climate leadership on the global stage. The report estimated that by 2035, we would be able to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 38% to 56%.
Now the low end of that spectrum has become overly optimistic. Rhodium has revised its estimate downwards to reflect revisions to the tax credits in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — namely, the early end of subsidies for wind, solar, and EVs. The new report also takes into account tariffs, which primarily serve to reduce industrial activity in the U.S. in the near term, Congress’ cancellation of California’s vehicle emissions waivers, and Trump’s efforts to roll back greenhouse gas regulations. The result is that Rhodium expects emissions to decline by 26% to 35% by 2035.
The gap between this projection and last year’s represents about 800 million to 1.3 billion metric tons of carbon. On the high end, that’s roughly equivalent to the emissions from California, Texas, and Michigan combined.
The estimates are expressed as a range because the report looks at what would happen under three different scenarios. The highest emissions scenario models a world where oil and gas prices remain low, clean technology costs remain high, and the economy grows faster than current projections. The low emissions scenario is the opposite — it shows how Trump’s policies will affect our trajectory if oil and gas prices are higher, clean technologies see steeper cost declines and performance improvements, and economic growth is more aligned with current projections. The mid-emissions scenario splits the difference.
The most significant policies for shifting our emissions trajectory, according to Ben King, one of the report’s authors, are the combination of tax credits and regulations affecting the power sector. The regulations, in particular, mean the difference between having almost no coal plants on the grid by 2040 and retaining as many as 77 gigawatts of coal power by that date. “That’s still a massive decline in the amount of coal relative to what we have today,” King said, “but it is a very different-looking grid than if those regulations were to stay in place.”
Whether coal plants are replaced by clean energy or natural gas largely depends on the cost of each. Somewhat counterintuitively, the report projects less coal in the high emissions scenario because low natural gas prices mean that gas plants supplant both coal and renewables.
Even the forms of clean energy that the Trump administration supports, such as nuclear and geothermal, are not expected to play a significant role in reducing emissions over the next 15 years. For example, in the low emissions scenario, where oil and gas prices are high, about 2 gigawatts of new advanced nuclear is added to the grid in the 2030s. But because the tax credit for existing nuclear plants is set to expire in 2032, the models project that 2 gigawatts to 5 gigawatts of nuclear power will shut down in the 2030s, more than canceling out the additions.
The effect of unwinding transportation-related regulations and incentives is more straightforward — fewer EVs, higher emissions. Last year’s report projected that up to 72% of all light duty vehicle sales would be electric by 2032. The new report expects light duty EV sales to make up just 43% of the total, at most, by 2040. This is almost entirely due to the loss of greenhouse gas rules. If those remained in place, EV sales could reach 71% by 2040.
Perhaps the only bright side in the report is a section on household energy costs. The loss of tax credits for renewables and home efficiency upgrades will raise electricity bills compared to the projections in last year’s report. But despite that, Rhodium expects overall household energy costs to decrease in the coming decades — in all scenarios. That’s primarily due to the switch to electric vehicles, which lowers transportation costs for EV drivers and puts downward pressure on the cost of gasoline for everyone else.
No modeling exercise is perfect, and this one contains a number of caveats. One of the biggest points of uncertainty right now is how much energy demand from data centers will grow. The authors modeled just one pathway for data centers, with power demand nearly doubling by 2030 and more than tripling by 2040. But they note that analyst estimates fall as much as 80% higher or 80% lower. If demand turns out to be higher, “it would effectively turn up the dial on the trends that we’re seeing already,” King said.
Another area of uncertainty is that the Trump administration is working overtime to find creative new ways to stymie wind and solar development, as my colleague Jael Holzman has documented. It could turn out that these moves are even more effective than what Rhodium has captured in this report, King told me. With tariffs changing on a weekly, sometimes even daily basis, it was also difficult to capture how much of an impact they will have on technology prices, he said. Lastly, there’s a human behavior element that’s difficult for models to project.
“In the absence of government support, this is all going to happen on the basis of what private investors see as wise moves moving forward,” King said. “I don’t know the extent to which they might look at the uncertainty that the Trump administration is introducing for some of these technologies, and say, ‘Gosh, I’m going to avoid that for the foreseeable future, and maybe even beyond.’”
You might even call the Energy Secretary ... Chris Wrong.
I resent, as a rule, any news story about a politician’s social media presence. The social media post is simultaneously the lowest form of political communication and, for the journalist, the lowest hanging fruit. It is too easy to sit at your laptop, read tweets, and then write about them.
But I speak for hundreds of engineers, policy wonks, and hangers-on across the world of energy and climate when I ask: What the heck is happening with Chris Wright’s Twitter account?
Chris Wright is the current Secretary of Energy; before his appointment, he was the chief executive officer of Liberty Energy, the country’s second largest fracking company. He has been by far the most publicity-seeking member of President Trump’s energy policy team. He has helped oversee the president’s somewhat contradictory goals of seeking to reduce energy costs for Americans, support domestic fossil fuel companies, get OPEC to drill more, export as much natural gas as possible, and block the construction of new large-scale transmission lines and wind farms.
His substantive policy work is the focus of many other articles on Heatmap. For now, I want to focus on his and his department’s unpredictably confused political communications.
It began with the Department of Energy on the social network X. Several weeks ago, I started to conclude that the official agency account must have at least two authors. One of these people is familiar with how federal agencies usually speak — even if they add a small Trumpian flourish:
The other enjoys capitalizing verbs and has only a vague grasp of economic history:
One could nitpick here — “planes,” in the mid-1800s? — but there is no need to do so. As time has gone on, the official Energy Department account has begun to make more meaningful errors.
On Monday, for instance, the official DOE account proclaimed: “6 gigawatts of AMERICAN NUCLEAR ENERGY added to our grid!”
Six gigawatts of new nuclear energy is a lot. It took 11 years to build two new nuclear reactors at Plant Vogtle in Georgia, and that project added only 2.2 gigawatts. But the U.S. did not really add 6 gigawatts. In reality, the Tennessee Valley Authority had signed a confidential memo to eventually develop up to 6 gigawatts of modular nuclear reactor capacity. The memo contained no project timeline or financial terms. These 6 gigawatts remain, in other words, largely hypothetical.
As X users will know, some especially erroneous posts now get a “community note,” a community correction of sorts containing “important context” or an outright fact check written by other users. These notes are supposed to contain a link to an authoritative source. The Energy Department “6 gigawatts” tweet is the first post I’ve ever seen to get a community note linking to a news story also linked to in the post itself.
But this is not the end of the foolishness. Take this claim, from last week:
This is just not a very sophisticated thing to say. It is true that wind and solar pose a distinct reliability challenge for power grids, and that grid engineers have expended time and effort thinking about how to manage that challenge. It is even true that advocates sometimes downplay these challenges. But it is not true that these technologies — or the power they generate — are “essentially worthless.” Grid-scale batteries, for instance, exist; they can store energy during the day and then release it onto the grid at times of peak demand. Transmission lines — like the sizable Grain Belt Express project, which was due to receive a federal loan guarantee until Wright canceled the funding — can also help manage these resources.
But perhaps such errors are forgivable when they come from an official account. What’s odd is that the secretary’s own account has made even stranger errors:
I had to reread this post several times to make sure I understood it correctly. Even then, I didn’t believe I had the right interpretation until the internet energy pundit Alex Epstein clarified it.
At first, I thought Wright was making some technical argument about how solar panels will never be able to meet total global energy demand. This would not have been true, but at least it would have been sort of interesting. No, per Epstein, what Wright was trying to communicate is that if you coated the world in solar panels, you would only produce electricity. And since electricity makes up 20% of the world’s total energy use today, “you would” — as Wright says “only be producing 20% of global energy.”
Never mind that if you did cover the world with solar panels (which would, to be clear, be a very bad idea), you would in fact produce vastly more energy than the global economy consumes today. Never mind that if you even covered half or a quarter of the world with solar panels (still a bad idea), you would obviously shift the economics of electricity — so that you could then, for instance, use the excess power to synthesize liquid fuel replacements for use in cars, ships, planes, etc. Never mind that, by one estimate, a single solar farm the size of New Mexico would meet the world’s electricity demand. (Building this would also be a bad idea, but not nearly as bad as the others.)
No, Wright is not saying any of that. What Wright is saying is the far more inane thought that solar panels only generate electricity, and the global economy does not only run on electricity. Thank you for that insight, Mr. Secretary.
Perhaps Wright does not know much about renewables; he was, after all, a fracking executive until recently. But his account is also curiously mistaken about fossil fuels:
This tweet is somehow wrong twice — it understates our own accomplishments. The United States is already the world’s powerhouse of natural gas. It has held that position since the first Obama administration, when it surpassed Russia to become the leading producer of natural gas globally. It became the world’s largest exporter of liquified natural gas in 2023.
Natural gas, however, is not the world’s fastest growing source of energy; it is merely the fastest growing source of fossil fuel energy. The fastest growing energy source — of any kind — is solar photovoltaics. Solar generation grew by an astounding 30% from 2023 to 2024, according to the International Energy Agency. By a slightly different metric, renewables (which include wind) grew by 6% last year, while natural gas grew by 2.7%, per the IEA.
It is worth reading some of the replies to Wright’s solar tweet; what you see are plenty of Trump-friendly (or at least Trump-agnostic) accounts raising their eyebrows at his clownishness. Fossil nerds, based tech bros, even AI experts are raising their eyebrows and asking: Surely the Energy Secretary couldn’t be this, well, ignorant?
I can’t claim to know what’s happening in Wright’s mind. But I do know what’s happening with his policy — and this weak messaging, in my view, points to the intractability of Wright’s position. On the one hand, Wright leads the Trump administration’s energy policy, and that policy is now dominated by a culture war against any type of electricity generation that doesn’t, in some way, “own the libs” — meaning coal, natural gas, and nuclear. The government has arbitrarily halted offshore wind construction, blocked hundreds of millions in funding, and yanked approvals away from nearly complete projects. Even if Wright believes that offshore wind is ill-advised, this kind of interference with businesses and contracts is even more costly — it is not how someone acts when he is focused on energy affordability above all.
On the other hand, Wright represents that quadrant of the modern Republican Party that remains focused (however feebly) on technological development and economic growth. This cohort champions artificial intelligence and American re-industrialization; they want an abundance of cheap energy; they fear a rising China. They are also alert and informed enough to realize that China must be doing something right — otherwise it wouldn’t be industrializing so quickly — and that a country that can add 256 gigawatts of electricity in six months without breaking a sweat will probably find some useful way to use it.
Between these two poles, Wright must scurry. So he insists that the Trump administration is working to add as much electricity capacity as possible for AI, and brags that AI turns electricity into intelligence, then qualifies that only some types of electricity generation are good for AI:
He says that AI “is going to massively empower the human mind” and transform the economy, but adds implicitly that this can only come under certain conditions, which don’t involve power lines that irritate farmers, wind farms that trouble the president, or the fastest-growing new source of power on the planet. He calls AI “the Manhattan Project of our time” and says that therefore the government needs to get out of the way.
It is an act that has worked, up to a point, so far. But Wright’s public performance of his complicated role can only go on for so long. Everyone who enters the Trump administration imagines that they will do so with their public image and integrity intact. Not everyone can pull it off.